


[Meta]  Jo Harvelle & How She's Different From Every Hunter We've Seen Before She's Introduced

by wanderlustlover



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Meta, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 11:46:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Posterity keeping, meta piece written on June 20th, 2008 on Jo Harvelle and how her characters <i>is</i> vastly different from all the other hunter's we've been introduced to before her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	[Meta]  Jo Harvelle & How She's Different From Every Hunter We've Seen Before She's Introduced

I've been thinking about Jo and people's assumptions about Jo and the further I go around on this merry-go-round, the more I realize it's not that Jo's any stranger than the people she's being compared to, it's that the bare tv episode watcher comparison is radically unequipped to deal with the extraordinarily different background her character is presented to us in her bite-sized appearance. 

I said earlier that this would be about how her present state can't be compared to the Winchesters (which is how we compare everything in the show, as it is their show) because her background is radically different from theirs. Post- and (especially) pre-death in the family. I'm going to derail from that, at least in the beginning, because comparisons will make this a lot easier at the beginning for setting a foundation to my points.

We'll start with the Winchesters (convenient, no?). We can make conjecture on whether John was a hunter before Mary, but we don't know, so I'm not going to touch that. What we do know is this--

_John is a hunter, who drags his children everywhere, after his wife dies. They grow up being told to stay put in shabby motels, and having broke down Christmas's, and knowing their being lied to by their dad. Well, at least one of them. Sam thinks until he's eight dad is a traveling sales man, but we know the other side from Dean. (And somewhere in there they went to high school, which is not proven/referenced/text, but Sammy got into Stanford and their jibs about his smartness make this less a forgery happenstance.)_

_Fast-forward to the beginning of the show. Dad is still hunting, Dean does it because he's dad's boy, and story of the yellow-eyed-demon comes up (all too conveniently, ala season one setting). ___

__The reasons for their hunting in season one? Primary: finding their father. Secondary: killing a lot of evil things along the way. What happens: They find out about why mom died, how it's linked to Sam, that Sam's special. Dad dies, which leads to both a revenge kick and protect Sammy from the evil things kick. Which leads more death at the end. (Not saying names or anything, just spoilers in case for last ep of last season.)_ _

__The Winchesters by this right are a family of demon hunters got pulled into the gig by family ties. Mary's death. Jess's death. Sam's powers. John's death. Dean-Sam-Dean's death. It's all about family to them, which makes the hunting and taking care of other people secondary to the primary mission. Which is--protecting (what's left of) their family._ _

__This is a common trend in the Supernatural Hunter world. (Gordon's sister attacked/turned by vampires. Isaac and Tamar's daughter killed, then Isaac. Richie almost gets it from succubus.) No, that's an understatement. It's not common. It's the foundational assumption of the hunters we see. Something went wrong somewhere and that's how he or she became part of this path._ _

__This brings us to the Harvelle's._ _

___Harvelle history is very vague and I'm only going to go off of what is absolutely canon._ _ _

___The surviving Harvelle's (Ellen, mother, and Jo, daughter) run a saloon which caters 95% to hunters. A place where they can drink, plan, and be passed off cases the girls do (as seen in Ellen and Jo both handed off cases to the Winchesters, 2.02 and 2.06). They are not as anti-social or brow-beaten as most hunters, and are presented as woefully capable of verbally and physically beating the crap out of people who nose their way into their space._ _ _

__To break down to Jo, we have to break away from her parents. So I'll start with them. We know next to nothing about Ellen or William's past. We don't know how either got into the scene or why they chose to stay in or why they opened a bar for their fellow hunters or why it stayed open into the show. (Aside from it being a convenience to season two). What we do know from them exclusively._ _

___William hunted, usually alone, and co-ran a bar, until he died in 1995 on a partnered hunt with John Winchester. Ellen is a capable hunter, who chose to continue running the bar, after her husband's death, and wanted to raise her daughter to be anything but a hunter._ _ _

__And then there's Jo. Who doesn't fit most of the foundations/facts I've given above. But lets start with her facts. (In case the list confuses you, see Jo Harvelle's Hunter's Journals on the DVD extras.)_ _

___At earliest reference, Jo knew about hunting when she was eight. William gave her bows and arrows and encouraged her love of the hunting world. And one or both of her parents had her understanding enough of all of it she wasn't telling the kids at school._ _ _

___At eight, the Road House is already stationary and she's already helping in it, wiping down tables and carrying things to her mother. She has dozens of men she calls 'uncle.' During age ten, her father dies and she begins (what will be a concurrent pattern) of thinking school isn't teaching her what is necessary for living. At eleven, she starts her first hunter's journal, collecting all the facts and stories of the people who talk to her at the Road House, mimicking the other hunters. At twelve, there are school fights, fighting training, and research._ _ _

___Her first hunt is at sixteen. Seventeen is when she starts learning computer research and being called both a barmaid and kick ass street fighter. Officially a hunter at eighteen, multiple hunts. At twenty she lost the first hunter she was serially(in a romantic fashion) attached to vanishing mysteriously on a hunt. At twenty-three, she's making cases like a pro, and she leaves to be a hunter._ _ _

__This is a different life, and life style, from the above ones. Jo by the time of show canon has seen death--of innocents, hunters, and monsters. But where she is coming from and where everyone else is coming from is **vastly different**. _ _

__Jo grew up around many hunters, not only before there was death and mayhem personally for her in it, but hero-worshipped the act, the choice, and her father doing it (and was encouraged by him to do so). It came from a positive place--of love, respect, honor, family-before it could even come from one that fully understood. It was a job that needed doing, not because someone needed to be revenged, but because it needed doing. The world she grew up knowing already had darkness, evil and monsters and people needing to be saved in it. There is no grand maul shock._ _

__And more importantly--there is no other normal world (where the Winchesters (except Sam)/Isaac and Tamara/likely Ellen/Walker all had other lives before it. Normal, real, not containing boogie men or demons or death lives)._ _

__This is Jo's normal world._ _

__This has always been Jo's normal world._ _

__This is what she grew up with and what she expects and what is normal._ _

__She doesn't have a chip on her shoulder because darkness and evil exist. She doesn't even see them like that. They are just part of the air she breathes, something there her whole life and something she needs to help take down. If anything her only chip is that her mother wants her to be living a normal life that isn't something she's ever experienced, and by doing so, is holding her back from the only life she has known and from all that its told her she needed to be doing._ _

__If she contains a chip for her father's death it's not in the revenge fashion, it's in carrying on the mantel of his name and doing what he did, for the reasons he did it. His was not likely the first death she heard of, even if it was the one to hit home hardest first, and with fifteen years of Road House following on it, it wasn't nearly the last. She (and Ellen by the same accounting) has probably seen more hunters go down--either dying or simply vanishing or being gotten by the life--than any of the other hunters that get mentioned in the show. Why? Because we're addressing two decades of hunters and hunts and demons and stories parading through the bar. Two. Decades._ _

__If we're addressing all reality and sense, Jo likely expects to die on a hunt. (Reasonably, because hunters fall and she isn't death proof or superhuman.) And is hoping that she can take as many down before that date arrives. It's not a negative view or a death wish, it's just something she's seen happen over and over and over again. It comes with the territory and it's an acceptable risk to fighting back the darkness._ _

__Jo never gives the impression of wanting anything else out of life but be allowed to do the thing she was raised for. Does she admit to a crush on Dean? Sure. At least non-verbally in BUABS. But she never looks like she's angling for a relationship. And she never looks like she's the kind who's going to snag a guy, settle down and pop out her two point five behind a white fence. She doesn't want school. She doesn't want this other normal her mother keeps flinging toward her (which she tries and comes back home from, only to get hit with more of it)._ _

__She just wants to go out and kill demons, because it's what she grew up seeing was the most important thing she could do with her life. Which makes perfect sense to why she runs away when she realizes what she needs to do can't be done at home. And that not wanting another life will not be accepted. She has years and stories about how other people made this part work, so she follows in their footsteps, and her mothers._ _

__Leaves, works in a bar for money, and does what she's always known she should/would: hunts down the bad guy._ _


End file.
